


The Lighthouse Keeper

by drawlight



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Coming Untouched, Consensual Non-Consent, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Consent, Falling In Love, Fantasizing, HP Kinkfest 2019, Immobility, Light Bondage, Love Confessions, M/M, Not Epilogue Compliant, POV Severus Snape, Past Relationship(s), Pining, Post-War, Regret, Romance, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-10-27 13:00:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17767259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drawlight/pseuds/drawlight
Summary: Harry visits one Severus Snape every year on the anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts. This year, he brings a bottle of scotch (single-malt, 100-proof, excellently-distilled).





	The Lighthouse Keeper

**Author's Note:**

> To the lake of my childhood, which made me dream of lighthouses.

 

_“your body is as beautiful to me as lightning,_

_my flesh shines at your touch,_

_and together we make a holy monster [...]”_

Christine Strelan, Filthy Radiance

 

Let us diagram a love story.

How then does it go? There is the first sweep, the brush with attraction. The scrape of the heart against the sleeve of another. There is the minor fall, the major lift. The moment of conquering, even if it is only each other, as we plant our hands on undiscovered bodies and say _yes yes yes this is mine._ It is the temptation of the storyteller to follow the natural arc of a tale, to let the confession of love be the story’s climax, to let the subsequent years peter out into falling action and resolution.

Ever after is a story too.

In a sense, the study of love can be compared to the study of war. There is the initial conflict, the first firing of the guns. Each engagement is a battle. A brush of hands, a teasing whisper. The curl of desire, each a personal Gettysburg. The admittance of love is not necessarily a surrender. It is only when we give over to it, let it wash over us and do not ask for ourselves back. When we welcome love with open arms.

What kind of story is this? It is the tale of surrender. (Severus Snape has always hated that awful word.)

 

* * *

It is a measure of no small irony to Severus that he has chosen to spend his twilight years acting as a silent protector, guiding ships to safety in a tossing sea. It doesn’t matter. It suits him here, clinging to the cliffs, hanging off the world at a sharp angle. Here, on the Yorkshire coast, at the very tip of a dangerous coastline, he can be absent. Forgotten. Here, he can cease to be Snape (Former Potions Master, Former Headmaster, Former Everything). Here, he is only the lighthouse keeper. No one needs his background, his repulsive story. No, they only need him to keep the lights on. There are many things asked of lighthouse keepers, but it is never his name.

So he keeps the lights on. There are no holidays for lighthouses. Day and night do not matter. He sleeps in shifts. Six hours on, six off. Wake up, tend the light, patch a wall, brew tea. He checks the little calendar in the kitchen, hanging at an angle (all things are angled at the edge of the earth). It is nearly the end of April. Nearly May. He’ll have a visitor soon. He is _adamantly_ not overjoyed at the idea of Harry Potter’s impending annual visit, but after it comes the promise of summer. It is not much different, summer. Still wet, still damp. Dry is a relative term out on the coast. But the weather is milder in summer, it does not cut as deeply to the bone. Everyone needs something to look forward to.

April again. Eliot had once said it was a cruel month, this stretch of miserable, sodden dreck. He’d meant the storms, the desolation laid bare once the snow melts. It is like looking at a battlefield after a war, barren and burnt to a crisp. Cinders. Nothingness and raw. The world is uneasily solemn in the looming anniversary of the war. His skin feels too tight. It stretches across his skull like the old medieval tanners had stretched animal skins for vellum and parchment. He yawns sometimes just to remind his face to move. The earth gets warmer more quickly now, moves from ice to fire. It never touches the lighthouse, deep in stone and banked in earth.

On Sundays, he passes down the gloomy hallway, pulls on the old goose-down jacket, torn at the elbow. He walks the path, strewn with rocks and wild roses, to the little parish. Bows his ink-dark head during service but does not pray. Is there a God to offer prayers to? He has never seen God. (He has met the Devil. That is different. Not all things have an equal and opposite reaction. Severus has the mind of a scientist, he has never seen evidence for God.)

His mother had taken him to stay at the shore once, long ago when he was a child. It had been just after his father had packed up his few beer-stained shirts, his meager stash of tobacco chew. They had never spoken of his sweat-soaked father after. (Later, when asked, Severus has claimed that he has no father, that he was born half-crow. He looks like a crow regardless, mean and raw, so no one questions him. Large, hooked nose; mouth like a blade had gashed him. Black cobras for hair, like one of Medusa’s children. All ugly things know their hideousness. It seeps from them like body odor, like oily pollution in a lake. It doesn’t matter. So on, so forth.) He remembers his mother’s harsh glare at the sun. _“I’ll never fall in love again,_ ” she had said, her face hard and lines radiating like sunlight from her eyes, peering out to the horizon where sky and water joined in gradients of blue. She had looked like a warrior. Lady Athena. He had envied her. His little heart hardened then and he promised himself. Like Mama. _Not me. I’ll never fall in love._ (He had, of course, fucked that up too.)

The North Sea is unpredictable. It likes to drown men, pull them down under the waves to keep it company. He stares out of the rain-spattered glass panes, watching the water lash the earth. Sometimes puffins dot the shore. It is always wet here. There is only more rain and less rain. He has twenty-five different words for the types of rain. He’s heard the people who live in the tundra are similar, with their litany of words for snow.

The lighthouse is old. It had been completed in 1836. It juts out against the sea, impervious and unchanging. The sea is a riot of treachery; the lighthouse is immovable. They always have been unyielding, stretching out, back to the very first one. Homer tells us that the very first lighthouse was invented by Palamedes of Nafplio, in between moments of besieging Troy. But who can trust Homer? Instead, we can look to more established records. The Lighthouse of Alexandria was one of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World. It had been built on Pharos, a small and rocky island in the Nile Delta. It was raised from blocks of pale stone, a giant mirror erected at the top. They reflected the sun during the day, lit fires at night to guide the sailors home. (Severus does not use fire. His lighthouse runs on electricity. Little has changed in the two-thousand-year history of lighthouses. New oils sometimes, electric lights. That’s about it.)

Let’s talk about another date, Severus has been here since April 2003. Another April, always rainy. It had been five years since the war. (He counts his life into two epochs. Before the war; after the war.) What else had happened that year? It is the last time that a signal is received from Pioneer 10, some 12.2 billion kilometers from us, before it drifts away into that great nothingness of space. The Human Genome Project was completed, reading our biology like a book. In late December, the last known speaker of Akkala Sami had passed away, had taken all of the words out with them like putting out a light. So, then, had Severus given notice, packed up his few belongings, had come to the end of the world.

 

* * *

Trim the wicks, replenish fuel, wind the clockworks, clean the lenses. Most lighthouses are automated now. He could choose to automate. It would certainly be easier. But he’d wind up cast at odd ends. No, it is better to have a routine. Something to do with his hands. Something to keep that awful thought away, _I love you._

_Yes, that._

There is no joy in the admission. (He had always thought that falling in love should be a beautiful thing. It is a battlefield, it is a bullet wound. He picks at the hole fired into his skin, peels away the flesh. It is wretched to be so obvious. The blanket is too small, it does not cover him in the way it always has. He is revealed in his affection, made weak and wounded and so abominably _low_. And common. All creatures fall in love, he is no different after all.)

It doesn’t matter out here, at the end of the world. Desolate and barren, it might as well be Mars. Get out the brass polish, shine up the instruments. There is always something to clean. Always something to record in his notebook. It had been a surprise, the amount of writing he would do. _April 23rd, easterly wind. Nine-foot waves. Drowning weather._  When he had taken the place, he had not realized was that lighthouse keepers are also story keepers. We cannot discuss lighthouses without also talking of their reason for existence, so we must also talk of shipwrecks. Severus records winds and gales, waves and refuse. He writes down every smashed hull, every drowned man, pulled down by their ankles into the sea.

(On the very back page of the notebook, under the title _Shipwrecks,_ he also logs the unwanted yearly visits. Always on May 2nd. Always in the evening.) _Potter will be here soon. Just my goddamn, wretched luck._

The visits had not started with only Harry bloody Potter. No, it had been the whole lot of them, the Order and its miserable members. All clamoring about and trashing the staff lounge and the Great Hall with their camaraderie and their awful _memories,_ drinking half their bodyweight or more in scotch and firewhisky, gin and vodka. “Some of us are not so keen to remember, Weasley,” he had hissed, while Ron hiccuped in his ear.

“ _Some_ of us don’t want to forget, Snape.” (Ron will forget most of that particular night however, thanks to the excellent distillation methods pioneered by Ol’ Ogden.)

“Buck up, Severus,” Minerva had said, “Have a pint.”

After he had taken the lighthouse, Severus had imagined living out his remaining decades in some semblance of the peace an exiled man can manage. He had been, as he often was, incredibly incorrect in those assumptions. The memorial party, well after a few drinks, would always manage to find him. They’d crack into existence, Apparating not far from his living room. Knock on his door. Knock over his lamp. After a few years, the drinking party had dwindled. After a few more, it was down to only one, that ever-insufferable bane of his existence. Potter. It has been just the two of them for nearly ten years now. Most years are quiet, trading news and talking about the weather. Not talking about so much more.

They have a lot to never discuss.

* * *

Potter knocks on his door a little after five in the evening. It is May 2nd. Bull season, Taurus season. (The worst season.)

“Hey,” a bottle held up, obscuring the other man’s face, “I brought scotch. Get the glasses out.” Harry looks around. The little bit of Severus’ ignored breakfast stands out, the toast without butter lonely on a plate. His face turns doubtful. “Well, this is a bit more dismal than usual. Why do you stay up here?”

“You _do_ realize that one of these years, I will not let you in.”

Potter smirks, pouring the spirit into the mismatched empty glasses that Severus has produced. “You know, I doubt that if you haven’t already.” He looks up again, the black hair brushed back from his forehead. The scar has faded a bit more in the past decade, silvery now and smooth. “Seriously though, this can’t be good to be alone all the time.”

Severus scowls, his face taciturn, “It’s quiet.”

“You could come back, you know.”

He lifts his glass, evaluating the amount. Tops up Potter’s drink and his own. “No.”

“So,” Potter lifts his glass. “To winning. To killing that bastard.”

“Yes,” he says grimly, “indeed.” (They will not spend another moment on that old monster, lurking in the back of their joined minds. There are hallways they do not go down. What is past that door but fetid stink, a man like a gas chamber, acrid and vile? Tom Riddle will try to poison them even now. The world cannot forget so they hold it in their memories, isolated like a clean room for a virus. You cannot get out. If there is nowhere for the virus to turn, no new host to inhabit, eventually it will burn itself out.)

Silence is stronger in stone rooms with stone floors. It echoes off of the walls, the corners. There are few places for the silence to be swallowed up. In the absence, it is only breath that can be heard. “So,” Potter finally asks, “What do you do with yourself out here?”

“Paint.” He gestures to the white exterior paint set by the door. It is the endless, Sisyphean task of all keepers. Paint something, finally get down the little last corner and stand back to watch it dry. Once it’s dry, go back to the top and start again. All things need painting all the time. The wind is unkind.

“You could do it by spell. It’d go a lot faster.”

He shrugs. What would he do after?

 

* * *

“Entertain yourself, Potter. Do not touch anything,” he says, rising from the small wooden table, “I have to tend to the light.”

“What does that mean exactly?” Severus ignores the question. Potter’s asked it before. Lighthouse keeping is a very physical job, it keeps him strong and wiry. He prefers to do the work by hand and without the aid of magic. There would be no point to using magic, that would leave him free time. He’d have to fill it up in some other miserable way. Instead, he hauls pails full of whale oil or lard. Carries them up the curling staircase, across the elevated catwalk to the tower (seaspray battering his face, salt sticking to his eyes). There are one-hundred-and-twelve steps to the top of the tower. In the winter, when it is cold, the oil congeals and he carries it back, all the way back, to the fire. Hauls it back up again, melted down. Up and down, down and up. (It is better on these days, when he is bonetired. He drops into sleep on these nights and does not have the misfortune to dream.)

There is a storm coming. It sits on the edge of the air, humidity and warning. He opens the cabinet and drags out the marine-ply to cover the windows, to cover the sea buckthorn at the edge of the path. Severus is unaccountably fond of that little bush. Harry watches him, a frown curling at the corners of his wide mouth.

“Out with it.”

“It’s nothing.” Harry’s face, frogspawn eyes intense and narrowed at him, considering. It is like nitric acid to be under that stare. It lasts too long, Severus is worried he might come apart. _Quit looking at me like that._ “Just that you should try calling me Harry once in awhile. You know, for a lark.”

“No.”

“Fine.”

“Quit being a child. You’re sulking.”

“I’m thirty-four.”

“Same difference.”

 

* * *

The sun has long since set. Severus makes no move to turn the lights on. He does not often turn lights on in these recent years. He has learned to move through the dark. He knows how to boil water in the dark, stab a knife into a potato, check for doneness without looking. He could go blind really, it wouldn’t interfere with his day.

“Have you ever… really wanted something and realized it’s just not possible?” The other man stares into nothingness, at spiderwebs in a corner.

 _When have I not?_ He takes a sip, quiet.   _Picture it, then, you are seventeen years old. Picture it, I have had a dream, woken up in a dead sweat. My sheets stick to me, to my shoulders, the small of my back. You are still on the back of my eyelids. I am often betrayed, now here my body is joining in against me. Your sunbright and idiotic face. You were not supposed to be beautiful._

Say nothing, still the mind. He thinks of quiet and sunless things. The earth and stone beneath him. Where he is from, where he is going. Focus on the light. Aim it toward the horizon. Look there. (It is a sailor’s trick to focus on that boundary between sea and sky. Sea-people learn it as children from their mothers. Keep your eyes on the horizon, it will keep sickness at bay.) He can’t figure it out. No one worms their way under his skin, not like this. No one makes him want to take an arm and break it, to shatter the mandible, to fracture the supraorbital ridge with a good clean punch. He clenches his jaw, his hungry fist. It is strange how he wants Potter, in a heap, in a ruin, (in his bed). Close the eyes. Picture it, a fantasy. One surfaces, it is one of his favorites. He had dreamt it up years ago in another lifetime, in another world.

_A dark corner, an alcove, recessed into the hallways of the dungeon where the dark is heavy and damp. A push against a wall, Harry is there, slammed into the stone. Severus’ eyes (black as crushed beetles) flash with fury and want. I have wanted to punish you for so long. His hands are brutal, digging into the boy’s shoulders, leaving bruises in their wake. His mouth is a storm, a punishment, it could sink ships. He lashes at Harry’s mouth like a thunderstorm at a ship. I want to take you, break you, fuck you. (Fix you, cherish you.) The boy’s throat is long and tipped back and Severus noses at the bulged Adam’s apple, licking the sweat from the pale spread of skin. He urges one leg between the boy’s thighs and finds the darkhaired youth hard as stone, hard as fossils below. Harry keens, aching with need, rutting like a wild thing against Severus. I want you to want me as much as I want you. God, it’s not right how I want you._

Say nothing, no. It is better to be silent.

“So,” Potter says, drunk and stupid already. “Sixteen years.”

“Yes,” he murmurs, hesitant. _Does he mean the war or -_

“I’m still in love with you.” Said by a mouth that is not his own. (There is a moment where he believes this is another fantasy, he has certainly dreamt of it before.) His skin is tight again, too small. Where is the air? Explosions consume all oxygen from the atmosphere just before their moment. Fuel up, draw it in. Severus gasps at the air, there is not enough.

“Don’t say that,” he rasps. _Don’t say that to me, I won’t be able to bear it. Don’t give it to me, you might take it away again._

“But it’s true.”

“Nothing is true anymore,” he stabs with an ashen tongue, hemlock words. _Give it time, let the dust settle._  “You’ve said it to others, I don’t want to be another notch on your belt.”

“Is that what I am to you?”

Hands clench. When he breathes the air, oxygen and hydrogen, it is sharp as a blade. “I don’t know what you are, Potter.” _I don’t know what anything is right now._ What about the first time that Harry had said it? It had not been a full year yet since the battle; the school had still been alive with reconstruction spells. The ground had still been soaked with dried blood. The grass hadn’t grown there, where the hexes had once flown. (Strangely, where the dead are buried, the grass feasts on the breakdown of carbon dioxide, growing in thick, verdant, and lush. In death, there is life. _So it goes._ )

He can read Harry’s displeasure in the way he rolls his shoulders, in the thin line of his lips. Harry is not accustomed to secrets, to holding back. He does not keep things silent. The Harry Potter way is to let his love roll out into the light.

Severus hadn’t allowed it then, during their ill-advised month sixteen years ago. “Make sure you are not seen,” he had said. Harry had come most every night, usually with a change of clothes and a shower kit. He stayed the night most nights. It had been eminently impractical to insist that the boy keep his flat in Hogsmeade. It would have made far more sense to recognize the lay of the land, that they were in almost every way living together. In all manner but in name. It had not been rational, but Severus had insisted in silent habits. He never made space in the drawers, in the bathroom cabinet. When Harry had left in the mornings, Severus reminded him to not forget his toothbrush.

Harry had been agreeable then, he is often agreeable. Gentle, easy as a brook. But nothing flourishes in the darkness. Nothing good, at least. What can he offer from the dark? Vampire squid and poison mushrooms, mold spores. (Harry deserves better things.) Severus wants to tie his moments with Harry up with a bow, knot it tightly, keep it here in this room. He has many jars - potion jars and bell jars. _I could keep you here, under lock and key._ These walls are the confines of their relationship. He knows the edges of them, Snape and Potter, their one day per year, a bottle of scotch, a cold room (a hell of a hangover).

It won’t last. _How long until he is sick of you?_ It is easy to promise forever, Harry had promised it before. Had left still, Severus could have set a watch between the start of their month and the end. Forever is useless to us, we are born and die always. Our natural demarcations on the calendar. _Don’t promise me forever, most of it is useless. Promise me this, now. The next thirty years, maybe. You can’t promise, you left once before. Don’t you fucking dare again._

The Earth has many layers. We distinguish between _Earth,_ our home, and _earth,_ the soil we walk upon, drag our fingers through, bury our dead in. The soil is both beloved and a terror. Few dare descend far below, to the beneath. We are children of light, abhorring where the light does not ever reach. What skitters in the depths? Voles and spiders, worms that eat the dead. Some creatures were born in the dark, made to thrive on the absence. When a light is shone into these unearthed spots, these caves, these carved-out holes, these creatures scatter for cover. What right do we have to force them into the dawn?

Beautiful things do not grow in the dark. Severus stays underground. He has always lived in the dark.

* * *

They had had one month. Then, as quickly as it had come, it ended.

Harry had firecalled late. It had been a Saturday night. (He doesn’t remember who started it. Yet every night that Harry went out with his friends, he had called Severus to say he’d gotten back safely.) Severus couldn’t smell the tired-looking man through the fireplace, but he knew that if he pressed himself, his face, his nose, up against the other’s neck, it would smell like wool and sweat, spilled beer and dust. (And maybe a bit of the boy’s aftershave, though it had usually worn off by then. Severus had seen it in the mornings when Harry was there, smelling of cedar and cypress.)

“Ron and Hermione want me to leave you,” Harry had said, ever gentle as a freight train. (There are many words that Severus collects for Harry. Radiant, effervescent, infuriating, kind. _Tactful_ will never be one of them.)

Severus had arched one brow, stilled his features, “Do they now?”

“Yeah.” Harry looked to the corner of the room. The follow-up questions had lain dormant in the professor’s mouth, bitter as ash. _Why?_ and _Will you?_ He had known the answers to the first question already. Always because Severus could not seem to make space for Harry, never let him stay, never let them talk about their relationship save to Harry’s closest friends. Because Severus could not say _I love you._ Because he could not reach across that wide expanse of the bed, turn Harry over, pull him close. (He had wanted to touch Harry; he had been so goddamn _unsure_.) “I just want more, you know?”

“Potter,” he had said, “I told you that I would not change.”

“Yeah,” Harry nodded unhappily, running his hands through his flame-colored hair. “I know. Just. I need to know, do you want to make this work?” (Severus had hesitated, although the answer was always _yes._ He hates the word _yes. Yes_ is weakness. In _no,_ there is power. In that hesitation, he watched something pass over Harry’s face. It was over then, even if the words came later.)

How had they gotten there? Remember the start. (There is not a day that passes that Severus does not think about that first night.) Eight months prior, drunk on Halloween and firewhisky. He doesn’t remember who had started the yelling but he does remember Potter’s eighteen-year-old hands fisting and knotted in Severus’ robes, a snarl on his breath, and lightning eyes. _Who the fuck do you think you are, Snape? You can’t threaten me anymore,_ the shorter man had said. (Height had been important then, the tips of their noses nearly touching. Severus’ crow eyes looking down to Potter’s, breath from the other mouth condensing on his lips.) He doesn’t remember who moved first, if it was in anger or ache. Instead, he dives back in to how Potter had kissed like a demon, had torn at his skin, his mouth. They hadn’t made it off the wall, hot hands tearing at each other like the Maenads had ruined Dionysus. Severus had come in his trousers then, his release like a car crash, wrecked and rotten against Harry’s rigid thigh. (It had been so fucking long.)

 

* * *

Their glasses are incredibly empty. He focuses on that, not on the storm rollicking before him, a heaving mess of heated skin and meteor eyes.

“You’re drunk,” Severus says, pointing out the obvious.

“Yeah, that was rather the point of this,” Harry mutters, pointing at the mostly-empty bottle and pitching his voice low, in that exact timbre that he has long known Severus has a weakness for. He chafes; it is _unfair._ His black stare evaluates the younger man, swallowing up the ripple of the shoulder and leg muscles, the way the grey cotton shirt stretches to fit him. The muscular neck, the unearthly eyes (green as aphids).

 _I want you. This is unfair. Why should it be you? (Why should it be me?)_ The measure of his hatred for Potter is legendary. (Although he keeps letting the infuriating brat come back, year after year. He does not want to examine that one too closely.) Why would Severus Snape, Death Eater and villain, like heroes? He does not. Not golden boys, with their parades and their statues. Their easy smiles, their golden skin, the perfect pressure of their handshake. (Look back then at Harry Potter, aged thirty-four. Look at the bags under his eyes, the divorce signed, sealed, and delivered. Look at the silver starting at his temples now, the softness under his jaw, the still-so-fucking-indulgent smile.)

“You’re in no position to discuss this.” Voice like a blade. Cut it out, take it away. The air claws at him, at his skin, his throat. _Say something._ There is an awful tension in his stomach. He wants to run, he wants to break. He _aches_ and cannot say why. He is horribly sure he knows why. It is loud inside of him, raging. He needs quiet, he needs a drink, to break something, needs to _burst._ Anything, anything to drown out this cursed loudness ringing in his ears. He does not look directly at Harry, he cannot. He takes side-glimpses, coasts on memories. It hurts to look at the sun.

“I’m never in a _better_ position to discuss this, Severus.” Harry stretches his hands across the table, the tendons move, fingers splay, a thick vein dances over the back. _God, your hands are beautiful._ A pause, a curse. _Fuck, I’m drunk too._

_Fuck._

Then, dawn breaks. How does it come? There is no other manner but the gentle way that Potter rounds the little table, bumping it slightly with his hip. The way he takes Severus’ glass of scotch and sets it aside. The moment of _knowing,_ that addictive high of _yes yes yes._ Those hands that touch Severus’ clenched fists, brush up his arms, his shoulders. Those wide and square and absolutely _beautiful_ hands with their bitten cuticles, their ragged nails. Severus feels himself flush, always betraying and hated, this unattractive blotchiness that splashes across his cheeks, his throat. He closes his cockroach-dark eyes.

 _I want you._ (It is so hot in the scarce few inches between them. Is it his body heat? Is it Harry’s?)

The first paling of the sky, the first subtle shift from black to navy. The touch of those hot fingers against his skin. A forehead against his own. Their hair mixes together, equally murky. Breath traded. Harry’s hands (the color of wheat, the color of eggnog) trail down his face, push Severus’ hair back. He doesn’t dare open his eyes. Not yet. _Let me just float here forever._

Then, a mouth. Skin to skin, the purest rapture, the most honest trade. Their bodies, suspended in time. Entire universes crumble before Harry parts his lips and pulls Severus in. Like magic, this vandalism of emotion. Like a smashed transformer, sparking dangerously into the sky.

His reserve is not unlike a dam. Once breached, he cannot stop gripping at the younger man in desperate need, in a measure of all the heartache, in recompense for every year that he has slept alone and miserable. _I want you, I need you, oh god, you are perfection, you miserable idiot boy. I will do whatever you ask, you deserve everything. (It is so hard. I am an old man, Harry, I cannot be expected to go easy.) Be patient. (It is unfair, I am not patient.)_  

Surrender is not always a humiliation. (He is fifty-four goddamn years old, he should not still be discovering things.) Sometimes, Severus realizes, surrender is the purest pleasure. To sink beneath the waves willingly, give over. He has always needed to stand tall, firm, just he against the world. Uncompromising because if he compromised once, where would he stop? But joists are stronger than the rest of the wood, the rest of the structure. The skin of scar tissue is unlikely to be torn again. Where he lets Harry in, knitting into his very cellular, his skin and his bones, where he lets Harry prop him up, he is stronger yet.

Harry presses further, like a wave to the shore. Pushes Severus into the couch, into soft cushions which rise up around him like dirt fills in a grave. When Harry is close like this, moving like this, Severus’ eyes cannot settle, he cannot gather a mouthful. Sight is useless up close, everyone is blind. (Harry is blind, his glasses discarded on the floor. Severus makes a note to be careful not to step on them.) He must go instead by other senses.

 _Sound._ Breath, traded, breathing. The inhalation of atmosphere, composed of invisible gases of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and carbon dioxide. Take in the oxygen, feast on it, this thing so invisible and so necessary. Discard the rest. The sound of fabric against fabric. The hush of Harry’s cotton t-shirt, of the wool blend of his dark jacket. The wet noise of a mouth against his neck, moving over the back of his throat, behind his ear. (Harry is an intuitive creature; he learns all of Severus’ favorite places without being told. There, where the veins are close to the surface, where he feels exposed and delicate.)

 _Taste._ The taste of the other man has never been like what the stories told him (Severus has read widely, ever curious). Harry does not taste like treacle or mint, like chocolate or butterbeer. What is the taste of skin? A strange and salty emptiness. His mouth is under the boy’s chin, around the throat, up by the temples. Where he licks his lips tastes like the sea, like brackish water. Empty and like dust, like an oyster plucked from a rockpool. (Severus is a sea-person, as all people born to water are. He is not comfortable when taken far from the shore, he knows it is where he will go back to again. To and fro, like the tides. Harry brings the sea to him, the shale and the alluvium. The seaspray, the sound of an ocean storm. To sea-people, the taste of the ocean is calming.) Salt, yes, Harry tastes like salt.

 _Smell._ Smell is intricately related to taste, so the first smell is salt. But there are others, cast into the air, that he cannot taste. His nose swallows them up instead, written in this different, related language of scent. The smell of sour sweat, of laundry soap. The cedar and cypress of the boy’s aftershave. The musty smell of damp wool. There is a hint of smoke, yes, from the fireplace. The heat of arousal. We are finely-attuned to little details, especially to the smell of another creature. (The scent of the bitterness of arousal in the other’s damp trousers. The scent of his own.)

 _Touch._ The most intimate of all. Harry is a topographical map. Severus measures where he rises above sea level (biceps, the curve of his jaw, shoulder blades) and where he sinks deep beneath (the divot of his throat, the curve of his lower back, the bend of his knees). Severus is not a creature of touch, he does not offer it, he does not receive it. He can count on his fingers the number of times he has been touched in the past year. And now Harry, who had been Potter, who is now Harry. Who explodes over him, sparking like spot welding. (Should it be a surprise that a starved man does not know how to approach the feast? That he sneaks touch from Harry as he had once snuck food from the table, nervous about having it later? He is desperate, gripping the boy’s long frame hard enough to bruise. Afraid of being left hungry again.)

“What do you want?” Harry whispers, tugging gently at Severus’ hair, making him look at Harry. There is an uncomfortable but not unwelcome honesty to eye contact.

“Potter - “

“No,” the other man says, “Say my name. And you need to tell me what you want.”

_I want everything._

“Nothing good.”

“Sometimes not good things are good, you know, if the other person wants them.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“Don’t put me on a pedestal, I’m not so pure as you might think.” A flash of hot jealousy. Through the grey matter folds of his brain, through the ever-unfolding proteins and prions that make up Severus Snape. Through the nerves, the long vagus nerve which races down his spine. Where does the mind start, where does the body stop?

(The terror still comes when he thinks about after. _We fucked it up once before. Don’t you dare do this to me again._ How do you get past the first six months? Most of the poems talk of the beginning of love, the initial spark, the combustion, roar of the fire. Raging flames do not last long. They consume their fuel, burn themselves out, look for new things to live on and eat up. There are ways to stoke a fire, to feed it, but it must be banked and calm. Give value to the embers, there is warmth there, safe and long-lasting. After the heat of the beginning of the inferno, the residual burn feels cold, like an absence. We ratchet too quickly upward and never down.)

“Let’s go upstairs.” Whispered into his ear, tongue teasing the skin, leaving it cold after.

 

* * *

Is it true? Can it be real? He cannot reconcile this creature in his stark room, the grey walls with no art to offer relief. His rubber boots at the door, raincoat over the back of a chair. There is no color. Grey sheets and thin blanket, white netting, a little book next to the bed, upside-down open to the center. _Shipwrecks of the North Sea._ A glass of water, a packet of rose seeds.

“You always wanted to tie me down and punish me, didn’t you?” Potter whispers. _Yes, but not like you think._ He looks at the impish, smirking creature standing half-naked as a demigod and holding a measure of the white nylon rope. In a lighthouse keeper’s place, rope is everywhere. Tie down the windows, tie down the boat, tie down the dock, your hat, your very heart.

“Prove it,” Severus whispers. Harry blinks.

“What?”

“You left once,” his voice is quiet as an empty church. It echoes. “Prove that you mean it.” _I cannot take you leaving again._

“Alright,” Harry says, shrugging easily and stepping forward. Light falls on him through an open window. He cannot possibly be real. “Cast Legilimency on me.”

“Potter - “

“I’m going to prove it to you,” Harry always stands square, even now, like hero in a comic book. Severus scowls, eyes dark and angry but his fingers are already reaching for his wand, tucked away in his pocket. He is so base, so needy, he _needs to know._

 

* * *

It starts with a swirl.

Harry’s mind laid out before him, open and wanton and coaxing him in deeper. Severus has seen his mind before but it is different now, quieter but still as bright as a summer sky. The warmth is intoxicating. You cannot fake this, not with Legilimency. It is like swimming through sunlight, through maple syrup, through treacle. Warm. Gentle. The ultraviolet light floods him, it is dangerous, he should not stare at the sun. The warm pulses of long-banked love swell and eddy. There are cobalt waves of denial, of yearning, ache. The sick, putrid yellow of unrequited emotion. A dark red of anger. At the edges, at the end, comes a darker red still, painted with unrestrained want. Severus stares at Harry, who keeps his bottle-fly eyes trained on him. Focused and sharp, flaring slightly as the desire pulses in the strangest feedback loop. Severus can feel the ache, genuine and focused on the sharpness of Severus’ jaw, his furrowed and questioning brow, the lank, dark hair. He doesn’t understand (it doesn’t matter, he can feel it instead).

The swells of emotion pass, a memory emerges instead. It had started with a swirl; it ends with himself.

A vision of himself crowds his own mind, Harry pushes it in. Harry’s mind is like the rest of the boy, a riot of color and sound and sensation. Severus is afraid he might drown. Harry wants to show him something, _focus._ This vision is quiet, Severus sees himself (so much younger once) in an armchair, black-haired and black-trousered, looking for all the world like a skinny, starved crow. The memory is painted with heartclench. He tastes of the lightheadedness Harry had felt, looking at him. Him, the other him, pages through a book. What book had it been? He doesn’t remember, it doesn’t matter. His hands fumble at the glass of firewhisky. Harry is watching him, butterflies in his stomach and heat in his belly. (Hot jealousy, how can Severus be jealous of himself? _God, I am a base creature._ ) Severus can feel Harry’s affection, gentle and pure, warm as a smoldering hearth. There is nothing green about the red-tinged memory, it is not sick with that old familiar evil need, that grasping monstrous want. The desire is there, clean and bright. It tastes like cinnamon candy. Stronger yet, that constant hope.

"What is this?”

A quiet voice. “It’s the moment I fell in love with you.”

“Why here?”

“I don’t know. It was just you. That’s all.”

“You have terrible taste.” A gentle smirk.

“Shut up, you git.” There is a smile in Harry’s voice, he knows the score. The memory pulls back from Severus’ mind, leaving him awash in the pure emotion that Harry had started with. The razor edge of desire surfaces, Harry leans in, pressing his mouth to Severus’ temple. “I want you to take me to bed, I want you to tease me as long as I can last.”

 _Jesus fucking Christ._ He arches an eyebrow, hiding behind it. “Quick to jump in?”

A wanton smile, “I’ve had fifteen years to think about it.” He takes Severus’ hand, long dead-fish fingers wrapped in the suntanned grip. “Come to bed, please. _Please.”_

 

* * *

There are spells to immobilize a man. Potions, little charms. Severus chooses to do it by hand. After these long years on the ocean, he knows ropes and their knots. He ties the white cord around Harry’s wrists, his offered ankles. Make sure it doesn’t pinch, that it won’t tighten in the struggle. (It is strange, tying Harry up. He had always imagined that restraints were for the benefit of the unbound, allowed to indulge their lust with no way to stop them. This is different, this is for _Harry._ Harry, whose grasshopper eyes darken as Severus winds the cord. Who is desperately swallowing the air, arching into the touch, thrilled at being laid bare. Severus slowly begins to understand how to give. Desire is not always the need to take, to possess, to leave ruined.)

_I want you to feel good._

“You love this,” his voice drips with wonder, he drops into an armchair near the bed.

“You have no fucking idea,” Harry says, moaning slightly. Severus hesitates, he’s never done this before. Perhaps it is a bit absurd, jumping into the fire. _How many nights will I get?_ He doesn’t know, so he makes a fantasy come true. Perhaps he can parcel out the fantasies, convince Harry to stay, like Scheherazade telling her one-thousand-and-one stories.

Lashed to the bed, Harry squirms slightly while testing the limits of the rope. Blood like a whitewater rapid, a waterfall. He is ten foot waves, he is lashing at ships. The room is nearly silent. (Harry’s breathing is involuntary, painted with arousal and rough.) One betraying hand rises from the armchair, skeletal and pale as sour milk, traces down his chest. The slight pressure, even through layers of thick black cotton, feels heavy as a promise.

Harry watches, eyes wide and mossy. His back arches against the mattress, wrists slightly pulling at the rope. Severus smirks, easing his hand into the gap of the woolen trousers. The ache between his legs jumps at the touch, it is only his own hand. It is the most intimate thing he has ever experienced. Harry’s eyes show thirst in the minute dilation, tides of irises and want. _I need you, fuck fuck fuck, the things I want to do to you._

“Fuck, that shouldn’t be so hot,” the whisper of Harry’s voice, “Please, please touch me. I need you.”

It is fascinating how Harry does not move but Severus can drink up the involuntary motions of his want. How does it go? The pupils dilate, the blood rushes, the cock twitches and pulses. Harry’s breath is a tornado. He keeps his eyes open, focused on Severus. The older man feels strangely laid bare under that unrelenting gaze, he had never thought of himself as an exhibitionist but it is the most clenching moment of his life. (It is a surreal moment. He is untouched save for his own hand yet he has never felt so wanted, so wanton.)

“Fuck,” he says.

“Yes, God, yes, Severus”

“Can you come like this? Just on words?”

“I - _Fuck yes_ ,” Harry whines, closing his eyes tightly, “Oh god, do that again. Touch yourself.”

“Careful, Mr. Potter,” he says, drawing himself out from his wool slacks.

“Fuck, Severus, do you have any idea how much I’ve wanted this, you, how I’ve dreamt about this?” Harry says, murmurs like a brook, “Every night, every bloody fucking night.”

Consider want.

_What do I want? I want you to come for me. I will make you come on the knowledge of my own want. You there, up against that rough wall with one hand in my hair and I want you to pull, I want you to make it hurt, I want to go back to the dungeon still aching with the memory of you. Push your robes aside, those damn Muggle shirts aside, your pale stomach and that trail of dark hair exposed to the cool air and forming goosebumps like condensation. I’m going to shove my hand in, there is no time, we could be caught (I am impatient), take your dick in the palm of my hand with a little spit. I want to work you like an oil pump, the bumps and ridges of you, the helmet of your cock piercing through my fist, our breath hot and shared, my lips right next to you, right next to your mouth and just not quite touching. (Later still, you. Within me, I want your cock like a shovel. Dig into me, dig me out, bury me with you. I have never dared before.)_

His want is sharp. It aches, slices. Like a scalpel, a blade, flaying his skin. The things he wants to know are cruel and unfair. _Have you ever taken your cock out in class, have you ever teased yourself through the thin fabric of your pockets, drawn a ring around the rosy tip? When did you first want me? I need to know._

“Touch me _please_.”

“Patience,” he breathes. He draws closer to Harry, that long form writhing on his bed (it has been too long). This single bed, these grey and threadbare sheets. “I want to explore you, Harry." An ocean-deep whisper, breath hot against the other’s ear.

“You’ve seen all of me already.” Severus shakes his head. _No, it has been too long. I want to know what has happened in the fifteen years that I have not seen you. Some of you is entirely new to me, some I have already known. Your stem cells will last your entire life, so I have loved them already, I will love them again. Your skin is new, your hair is new, your blood is new. I have not loved those yet._

He moves over Harry slowly, like the moon eclipsing the sun. Dark over light. His mouth hovers over each part of the other like reading an old map, still searching for treasure. He does not touch, his lips remain a centimeter or so above Harry’s gooseflesh skin. They breathe heavily. In and out, in and out. He doesn’t know which is the sound of his breathing anymore. _I want to be a part of you. In you and outside of you._ They could consume each other like twin fires, mixing together in their fury, burning themselves out.

“I love you,” Harry moans, (Severus ghosts over his solar plexus, his lower abdomen, down the insides of his thighs.) “God, I’ve always loved you, all this time, Severus, fucking _touch me_.”

He shakes his head, smirking and silent. His hair moves with him, he watches Harry’s eyes widen as the strands get close to brushing against him. He arches toward Severus, to the dark hair, rising like a swell of the sea and ravenous for sensation. Severus pulls away. Harry groans, desperate. Untouched.

He aches, the tease is not only Harry. It is torturous to be denied, still after so long. _I need you. I would have taken the apple for you, been cast out of the garden._ His mouth moves to the fire, to the smoke above. He hovers just over the tip of the other’s cock, dark as bruised plums. Where do you start the feast? Harry is aching and broken and it has faded into a maelstrom there up on the pillow, a litany of _fucks_ and _gods_ and _jesus christ severus._ (He has always had a thing for sacrilege.) Gather up the breath, hold it in the mouth for a moment, good and hot. Let it gust rough and warm and humid over the needy tip. Harry cries, undone by a gust of wind. Undone by Zephryus, as he cries out to the sky, to the popcorn ceiling and its bare light fixture, crying desperately as he comes and straining against his bound hands, straining toward the lighthouse tower as if it were Heaven.

 

* * *

“You’re hard as fuck, holy shit.”

“Entirely your fault, you deviant brat.”

“You liked it,” Harry smirks, entirely too pleased with himself. His long limbs curl around Severus, lining their hearts up as they lean into each other, like planets aligned in syzygy. “What do you want?,” Harry whispers, “I want you inside of me. If you want that.” Severus clenches his teeth. _Give in. Surrender._ (The words sit there, heavy. Surrender is something he has never been able to give over to without fighting. Who goes over Niagara without terror?)

 _Oh god yes._ “Yes,” grits its way out from where it is tightly held. When has he not wanted that? To be buried safe and sound and _wanted_ within Harry, to feel the boy crest up around him, arms drag him under in his own expression of desire. He aches to mark, to claim, to possess. ( _It is not right to want you the way that I do._ ) He wants all the same, he always has. Desperate and aching, wild with need. His cock is hard enough to hurt, like a goddamn granite pillar monument to his parched thirst. Teasing Harry, watching the boy crest just on the knowledge of Severus’ furious hunger, had brought him to the edge. Backed off again in the interval, now Harry’s hands drift over the front of his shirt, his trousers. The warmth from his skin permeates through the woven cloth. _You will ruin me._ (If he does not get what he wants now, he will surely die.)

When Severus sinks into the other’s body, slowly inch by inch, his mind is not as blank as he’d expected. _No one else will ever touch you like this, you’re mine. No one will touch me, I am yours. I will incinerate myself before I allow it (will incinerate them). I want you to hurt a little after, in a good way, a way that when you walk, you remember every moment of holding me inside you. I am safe here (within you) and warm. You say you love me. You have never been good at lying, it must be true._

All dances must be learned, so they start clumsily. At first, Harry rides the wave of Severus’ rut, but he quickly learns to slam back against the narrow hips, driving Severus’ cock deeper inside him. The strangest impalement. It is an oddly revealing thing, to fuck. The weight of performance stands before him. _I want to make this good for you._ He had thought that he wouldn’t last, his desire was so encompassing, but his nerves clang, clatter up. Harry’s voice gentles him through the terror. “Yes, love, just like that, oh fuck I want you, fucking take me, mark me, I want to never walk again without knowing that I’m yours. Jesus, fuck, I’ve wanted you forever, haven’t I? You have no idea, the way I want to just, oh my god.”

Harry sucks at Severus’ neck like a vampire, like a leech. Sealed and secure, pumping at the sallow skin, shattering the tiny capillaries into a great sea of dark bruise. “I want,” the boy says, his breath hot against Severus’ skin, bringing sweat to the surface, “I want you to look at this later. Tomorrow, when your brain gets carried away like it always does and you start to panic and wonder if I want you, I want you to pull that stupid collar down and _look_ at this mark and remember that _I_ left it there for you, that I claimed you. I want you to jerk yourself off, while looking in the mirror, and I want you to think about how _I_ want you.” _Fuck, what the fuck, yes, good god, yes._ He doesn’t know where this possessive, dominant creature has been coaxed out of but it unfurls from Harry and Severus keens into it, going willingly, skating off the edge of coming, needing this strange sort of permission. His vision flares into pure white, his eyes slammed shut, thinking of shipwrecks and fire.

Perhaps it was never about possession, perhaps it was always about needing to be taken, loved, approved. Perhaps, it is not about taking, but about giving. Strange thing, love.

* * *

When Harry sleeps, he naturally turns toward the light, toward the windows. Curls in upon himself, faces away from Severus. It is different, waking on this halcyon morning, the boy nestled into his arms like a matryoshka doll. Layered, unending, his heart cradled within Harry, set then again within himself. (Harry is gentle with it, he doesn’t know it’s there.) Severus has never been good with sleep, has developed a tolerance to most sleeping draughts, so he watches Harry for long spaces. The long night gives way to the dawn.

He likes the dawn best. It is a private moment, a secret he holds just between himself and the world. It is easy, in that space between black and light, to imagine that nothing exists beyond this simple bed, these four grey walls. Night gives way to navy, moving into progressively lighter shades of blue as their sliver of earth passes through the stations of dawn, first astronomical dawn, then nautical, civil, and finally sunrise. (Sunrise is always a betrayal. Back again to the day, to the dull of grocery stores and wind knots. Day is plain and stale; night leaves him tense and nervous. Dawn holds promise. It is magical; it is transcendent.)

The light in colors on the boy’s eyelids, like a drop of Naples yellow on his cheek. If Caravaggio had met Harry, he would have jumped to paint the chiaroscuro boy, the birdnest of night-colored hair, the sharp relief of the pale daybreak of his skin. Harry craves the light, he curls up in the chairs it drenches, keeps close to windows, flies through the sky. (Severus had always been nervous when Harry spins his broomstick high up into the stratosphere, feasting on cirrus clouds. It is too near the sun, it should not be done. Consider Icarus, who had flown too close to the sun. Harry is not so different from Icarus, thirsty for light. _Be careful_.)

“I can’t lose you,” he whispers, heavy as a leather boot.

A voice rises from where its mouth is pressed into thin pillows. “You won’t.”

 

* * *

What was that about a fantasy? (He doesn’t want to share this one, it is his favorite. It flashes into his mind before he can stop the flow.)

Picture it. A house in Devon. The windows open to the scent of sea and heather. Harry, lying there asleep in a twist of cotton sheets, the spread of his muscled back open to the air, dotted with dark moles and freckles and ready to be read like the stars. Severus runs his hands, longfingered and everjealous, over the great open plains of the skin. He reads the divots and swells like Braille, opening Harry like a long-cherished book.

 _I want to learn you. Have you ever been loved by a wretched fool? I want to take you, taste you, I want to pick the stars down from the sky, one by one. I have never loved like this before, I am not a man who knows how._ He licks a lazy river around the boy’s nipple, watching the flesh grow from soft to firm in an act of transmutation. A moan rises up, fists in his blackheart hair, ever stringy like snakes, like cheap yarn. It doesn’t matter. _I need you. This is how I need you, I have never said it before. Will you bend to me? I want to open you, you are home. I need to be safe within you, without you._ His cock, hard and ready as a knife, as a fist, covered in a lubricant potion. It smells of licorice, he smells of salt, sweat, bitter precome. Harry on his back, legs falling open, magnificent goddamn cock rising to meet him. Push forward, be gentle. Rest. _Are you okay?_ The clench, the slide. _I want to fuck you until I forget everything, until stars die. You were born to fire, raze me, purify me, clean me out, start again._ Rutting like a goddamn animal, the sweat pouring from the crown of his head, his chest, his back. Harry is moaning wildly, (“Yes yes yes, fuck, Severus, I’m going to come”).

Wait, on second thought. Maybe, maybe he will share that one.

 

* * *

“I love you, you idiot. You know that, right? You don’t have to say it back but it’s true.” Harry’s fingers map roads and motorways across Severus’ back, dipping into the curve of his neck, dancing over his jaw. Severus frowns slightly.

He hates the phrase _I love you._ It is said by everyone, common and dull, dirtied by other voices and other mouths. He wants to say something new, offer something original. Who said it first? Who do we borrow it from? _I love you, what a tedious phrase._ How can it be compared? You can love a color, a film, a crossword puzzle. How can he pick up that ill-fitting word, dust it off, and offer it up? _You deserve something better._

How can Harry not know already? He sees the boy with the skeleton key, opening the older man up, laying him bare to the sun. This is it, the terms of his surrender. So Severus seeks the memories he keeps like jewelry sewn into his coat. Built up like insulation against a coming winter.

Go on then, Severus, lay the memories out like a pack of cards.

Sleeping beside the boy. The even and perfect temperature. The rise and fall of his chest, proof of life, a reminder of their victory in war. Harry had lived, they both had lived. When Harry pulls away, there is an emptiness there as wide as a canyon. Severus wants to pull him back. When he could not and Harry had left, (his pride is always too much) then he would push his pillow down, holding it like the boy’s body. It is not the same, pillows do not have heartbeats, they do not breathe.

Harry’s body. _I would love you without that, you know._ He has considered this, how much of the body could be removed before he goes cold? In his mind, he goes layer by layer. The integumentary system, circulatory, skeletal. He can get down to only the dirt, it would never matter. So, by process of elimination, this is more than lust. He loves Harry consumptively, possessively. It is not right, no man should ever want someone like this. He will destroy the other man. He would claw at Harry if he could, bite through, leave the scars between the shoulder blades, the thighs. Marks of ownership. If someone else were to see them, they would know, _Severus Snape loved him._

Lust is always dull, that primal and uninteresting want. If there is want, it is all of the same flavor. Lick it up then from a spoon, off of your chin where it drips. Thud, thud, thud. So it goes, ever-present want. What about love? Love is always amorphous, it changes from day to day. He loves Harry one moment like a blaze, his own pride tied up with that lion. Watch the young man cast out into crowds, his ease of speech, his ready comfort and kindness. Severus has never been good at these things, he can appreciate their absence. He loves Harry for it. (Who doesn’t love the sun?)

It is difficult to bear hope. What about the explorers? The dark spots of the maps where the old cartographers had written _here be dragons._ Who had taught them that unquenchable hope, to cast off into an unknown sea for an unknown land, only riding on hope? Hope has always been a strangeness to Severus, as odd as the kingdom of the Fisher King, as untouchable as Shangri-La. How can you dare to hope? Love cannot last forever (it hadn’t before). He has seen a farce of domesticity when remembering his parents. Love had not lasted there.

It is unfair that hurt leaves scars, imparts wounds, and love does not. We can look back upon our bodies like an index at the back of a book, look up when this laceration occured, who inflicted it and why. We remember all the hurts, add them up like pins on a map. Where you are cherished does not leave a mark upon the body. When your heart is cupped, when someone drinks of your love and pours it back into you, we can forget. There are no landmarks of love. We have to work to remember. Write it down, perhaps, on a little index card. _May 2nd, on this date, you loved me. I felt warm._

 _“I love you,”_ Harry had said.

Severus leans up slightly, putting his weight on a complaining elbow, studying the darkhaired man beside him.  Then quietly, “Do you honestly think I would have put up with your insufferable company, and your ability to drink up all my good scotch, for all these years without being irritatingly in love with you?” (Half-obscured by insults but they are both sharp-eyed. They know it for the dove that it is, the olive branch that is offered.) Harry smiles, soft. Silent. One hand reaches and brushes the inky hair from Severus’ sweat-soaked brow. “Stay here,” Severus murmurs, “I will be back shortly.”

“Where are you going?”

“Just to check the light.” Lighthouses do not exist without hope; he’s been trading in hope all this time. Go on then, through the dark, to a fixed point. We do not fumble through bleakness without the idea that light lurks over the horizon, behind a door, behind a kiss. A surprise over the long wine-dark sea, guiding ships home to shore.

Wait, wait. This is all wrong, the story is backward. This is not the ending, this is the start. In this timeworn room. Faded and dingy. What happens in the beginning? The invention of light, that was the first day. So then, does Severus Snape fall entirely into the deep, surrendering willingly. The bare walls are a violent light, exploding outward. He sees everything at once, from blood to bones to stars and the moon. He is a universe; Harry is a universe. When he kisses Harry, he swallows down the sun. Welcome then to the profanity of light, to the beginning.

Come on then, come on up out of the dark.

  
  
  


 

Art by likelightinglass.

**Author's Note:**

> For information about lighthouses and their keepers, I have drawn extensively on my own experiences growing up on the edge of a deep lake as well as the diaries of lighthouse-keeper William Norgate, who wrote them between November 1893 to November 1929. Also to Leonard Cohen, Jeanette Winterson, and to Christine Strelan, for inspiration.


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